Want to quickly and easily improve your fitness website?

If, like me, you were working two jobs and trying to find time to build a personal training business, you’re probably thinking of ways to systemise things to get some time back and give your clients the best possible experience.

In this short blog post, we’re going to learn exactly what business systems are and what you can and can’t systemise.

Then we’ll outline a proven process to help you prioritise your business systems so you can find which tasks need the most urgent attention.

Let’s get straight to it.

What are Business Systems?

In the context of a personal trainer business, they are any tasks or processes in your business that you repeat over and over again.

It’s something that you either do at the same time or in the same way.

The easiest example of a business system is an email autoresponder sequence that introduces your business to new prospects and build rapport over a series of emails.

Other systems might include automated invoicing, client on boarding or even something as specific as a consultation can be somewhat systemised.

What we’re going to concentrate on today is learning exactly which systems you need to prioritise.

It’s really easy. Here’s how.

Step 1: Create a List

Make a list of at least 10 tasks that you either really suck at, bore you to tears or that someone else could easily do for you. To make this easy, we’ve created some categories for you:

Accounting, Cashflow and Bookkeeping

Client Management, Workflow

Payments

Online Training

Website Design and Maintenance

Email Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Content

SEO

For each category, pick a few tasks that you generally do often and write them down. The more the better.

Step 2: Sort Tasks by Time

Next up, sort all of your tasks by how much time they take you. To do this, rank each task with a number from one to ten. The tasks that take the longest time get a 10 and the tasks that take the least amount of time are 1.

Step 3: Sort Tasks by Importance

This one is a bit more tricky because it can be difficult to define what’s important and what isn’t. For me, client facing jobs are always the most important tasks. Without happy clients, you have no business.

So ask yourself, which tasks have the greatest impact on the quality of the clients experience?

Again, the most important tasks are ranked 10 while the least important tasks are ranked 1.

Step 4: Score Your Tasks

Now add up the two rankings from each task. For example, if you had a social media task that ranked a 6 in time and a 5 on importance, the score of that task is 11 (6+5).

Once you’ve scored all of your tasks, you should be able to clearly see which tasks require the most urgency.

Of course, you’re going to find that some tasks may not be able to be systemised right now because of financial restraints, but that’s the beauty of this process. Once you free up time on the tasks you can systemise, you can make more money to pay someone to help you with the tasks you couldn’t previously afford.

Step 5: Choose your Systems

Some tasks will require a human touch but for others, there’s probably an app for it. If you can’t fully automate something you can almost definitely semi automate it and save yourself some time.

The easiest way to find apps to systemise your personal trainer business is to literally Google them.

Accounting system

Best client management software

Payment service providers

Online training software

Personal trainer website design

Email marketing software

Social media scheduler

Fitness writer

SEO software

Seriously. Google will bring up the apps that are generally the most popular.

A word of caution though. It can get a bit overwhelming so be sure to choose something, stick with it for some time and change later if you have to. There’s nothing worse than paralysis by analysis.

Need help?

Download our Ultimate Guide to Business Systems for Personal Trainers. We’ve detailed several systems for every category we talked about earlier and then further organised all of the business systems in to DIY, semi automated and done for you sections so you can make the best decisions based on your spare time and budget.